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saw little HFSS advertising online and would ignore any they did see. The studies show that parents, who currently focus on
the serious but rare Internet harm of “stranger danger” or online grooming, lack awareness of the much more widespread
form of online risk and harm to which their children are likely to be exposed frequently. Once parents were shown examples
of HFSS marketing that appealed to children and adolescents, however, they expressed alarm at the sophisticated, highly
engaging techniques used, often considered this form of marketing to be exploitative and expressed a desire for it to be
reduced. Parents’ lack of awareness of their children’s online HFSS marketing exposure raises the broader question of
their ability to know about their children’s media activities and exposure, particularly on mobile devices. Conversely, digital
platforms, marketers, food companies and other digital actors have extensive knowledge of children’s activities online – and
it is to this issue that this report now turns.
Marketing in the new digital media landscape
Digital technologies have revolutionized advertising and marketing (72). In this section, we first outline the nature of the
new advertising ecosystem that facilitates marketing, define digital marketing and then describe the analytic and creative
methods used by digital marketers.
Tracking and targeting Internet users online
In digital media, an extensive, highly complex system of advertising delivery has evolved, through which marketers can access
much more specific audiences than in the broadcast era. A number of intermediaries facilitate the exchange of advertising
and information between advertisers and websites and other digital platforms (referred to as “publishers”) (see Fig. 1). Ad
networks aggregate the online ad space of websites and sell it in packaged format to advertisers. Ad exchanges are auctionbased
“real-time-bidding” services, to which websites make their defined audiences available: advertisers can bid for access
to these specific audiences. To facilitate ad space sales and audience bidding, new platforms have emerged. Some manage
available ad space on the seller’s side (i.e. the websites or “publishers”) and are known as supply-side platforms. On the ad
buyer’s side (i.e. the advertiser), demand-side platforms provide the interface for buying ad space. The interaction of demandside
platforms, ad exchanges and supply-side platforms means that advertising space online can be bid for, valued and sold in
milliseconds. As advertisers now buy access to media through many different platforms and intermediaries, data management
platforms have evolved to interact with all the buying and selling platforms. These data management platforms aggregate,
analyse and trade data on Internet users (audiences), store “cookie IDs” and generate ad audience segments for advertisers
(73–76). Data management platforms “can help tie all that activity and resulting campaign and audience data together in one,
centralized location and use it to help optimize future media buys and ad creative” (75). The entire system is predicated on the
collection and analysis of ever-greater volumes of highly detailed user data. This “personal data tsunami” enables marketers to
“target and market to specific people… foster(ing) a more catered, lasting relationship than ever before … in ways previously
unforeseen (that) will only advance as we go forward” (77, p. 136).
Advertising delivered to users on the Internet is tailored either to the content that a user is viewing on a site (contextual
advertising) or to characteristics and preferences of each individual user (online behavioural advertising). To deliver
contextual advertising, information on users is collected within the website, app or platform itself (78). To deliver online
behavioural advertising, all participants in the advertising ecosystem collect and sell extensive information on users, drawn
from dozens or more trackers on any one site or platform. Information on users is merged from multiple Internet locations
and devices to create deep individual profiles that go far beyond basic demographics. User profiles include detailed data
on online browsing activity, devices and networks used, geo-locations, personal preferences and “likes” and social activities
in digital social networks (See box, Methods used to track users online and beyond) (76, 79–82). The use of tactics such
as “zombie” cookies, device fingerprinting and geo-location allow digital platforms and brands to build extensive, detailed
profiles of all who use the Internet, including children from 13 years of age. As a result, individuals’ “likes”, comments and
other activities and preferences in social media have become a valuable commodity (83, 84). The extent of the application
of these tracking methods is such that researchers have concluded that “advertisers are making it impossible to avoid online
tracking” (85).
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